Written Kitten is a delightful new writing-motivation tool that rewards you with a fresh kitten for every 100 words you write. Needless to say, I immediately contacted the makers to ask if I could make Written Puppy.

Also! Another donation rolled in today, from the highly awesome Lemming. This takes us to £15, which is enough to feed five shelter dogs for over a week!

This is what a string of sixteen wordbirds looks like (with bonus cute pic of my housemate’s chihuahua, Chloe):

I’d just like to disown that dodgy plaid wallpaper border left by the previous tenants. Been here 3 years and this is as far as I’ve got with redecorating…

Speaking of me failing to do things, I’m still having some trouble with depression and haven’t managed to do much since I lost my job – including looking for a new job or applying for Jobseeker’s Allowance, which I really need! I’m spending most of my time sleeping, surfing the internet, and angsting over all the things I’m not doing. This also means I haven’t spent as much time on my stories as I’d like, and have been spitting out a lot of very short ones in order to keep up. Still, I’m proud of myself for keeping up at all given the state of my brain.

To end on a more upbeat note, I must link to this wonderful Nanowrimo pep talk by Neil Gaiman, in which Neil reveals with his inimitable sense of humour that he goes through ALL the same crap that we lesser writers go through. I found it very applicable to what I’m doing and very encouraging.

Dogs Trust Bridgend is full to the brim with lots of dogs needing homes, including puppies. Please go here to see the lovely dogs available – including the GORGEOUSNESS that is Billy Bob:

Billy Bob is deaf and had been punished for his deafness before coming to Dogs Trust, and was very scared and unsociable. Dogs Trust have done such a fantastic job with him and he’s now a happy, excited, beautifully trained and VERY WAGGY boy just looking for the right home.

Being a Welsh shelter, Bridgend also contains plenty of collie goodness – watch to the end of that video for a faceful of Smithy the collie!

Dogs Trust are looking for a home for beautiful Lily and her devoted ‘guide dog’, Maddison.

Being two Great Danes, one of whom is blind, who need to be rehomed together, they’ve been having a spot of trouble finding a home. There’s been lots of interest in them since this article was posted, and Dogs Trust actually announced that they’d been rehomed, but then it fell through.

These two are lucky to be alive. They’ve been at Dogs Trust since July. Some shelters would have destroyed such hard-to-rehome dogs by now – or destroyed Lily alone. Dogs Trust never does that to a healthy dog (and despite her disability, Lily is healthy, happy, and runs around like any other dog.) Right now it’s looking really hopeful that she and Maddison will find a family, but if they don’t, they’ve got a loving home at Dogs Trust for life. And this is why I’m posting this in the ‘Why Dogs Trust’ category.

In other news, I’ve been sleeping with my origami paper under my pillow. I am a dork.

I’ve been looking at An Act of Dog, a fantastically ambitious art project that makes my writing project look like a walk in the park. Their aim is to make America the first no-kill nation – a tall order given that 5500 dogs a day are killed in American shelters.

The only statistic I’ve got on British dog deaths is that local authorities kill 20 healthy dogs a day for want of a home. That doesn’t sound so many until you actually think about 20 dogs:

The 20 dogs pictured are lucky – they’re all at Dogs Trust waiting to be rehomed. Dogs Trust never destroy a healthy dog.

But 20 dogs is actually the tip of the iceberg. Many more healthy dogs are killed in charity shelters – at least 5 a day in Battersea alone. All charity shelters have to make the horrible decision between destroying dogs they can’t rehome, or turning away dogs they could. There are no easy answers, and I do understand why some shelters decide to kill.

But I’m a BIG dreamer, and I want to see a day when that isn’t a decision. I want every dog to have a home or at least a shelter place for life. This is Dogs Trust’s wish. As well as caring for 16,000 dogs a year, they’re also working to make sure fewer dogs are abandoned or lost – educating children, helping people pay for neutering and microchipping, and helping people in the worst of circumstances to hold on to their pets.

But the only way this wish is going to come true is with a LOT more money.

Dogs are dying, in my country, every day, and if anyone is going to do something about that, it should be me. I can’t fix every problem in the world, I can’t fix this one, but I can help. Every dog I see on the street makes me happy, even the ugly ones, the elderly ones, the barky ones – I love them all. I can’t even explain how and why I love dogs so much, because I explain practically everything else I love in terms of dogs. They’re my fundamental unit of awesome. The thought that even one dog might end up dead when I could have stopped it is just - no.

It’s also a big loss to humans when dogs die. So much love we’re missing out on. And as a species, we need the love right now. Dogs are so good for our mental health. The dog that’s put down this hour could have been someone’s soulmate.